A commentary. Steenkamp is president and vice-chancellor of Royal Roads University, where Wolfe is a professor in the School of Environment and ­Sustainability.

With rising summer temperatures and more wildfire smoke, Victoria’s treasured YMCA pool has never been more essential.

Shutting its doors would undermine decades of community health, social connection and urban climate resilience.

Here are four arguments for why local leaders should rethink pool closure plans.

First, public swimming pools have anchored community life for more than a century. During the inter-war decades (1920-1930s), municipalities built “people’s pools” to foster social mixing and civic pride.

Jeff Wiltse of the University of Montana has documented how public pools foster social integration, democratic equality, and civic vitality — children from diverse backgrounds learning to swim together, seniors exercising safely, and communities bonding during heat waves.

Wiltse showed how urban aquatic commons have always served as sites of health promotion, cultural exchange, changing social (desegregation) and gender (bikinis!) norms, and collective resilience.

Victoria’s YMCA pool, opened in 1961, continued that tradition by welcoming immigrants, multi-generational........

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